“Don't let go of my hand, mom..." She got lost at Delhi station, spent years in an orphanage, and then....

"Don't let go of my hand, Mom." These were the words of a daughter afraid of getting lost in a huge crowd. Eventually, these words marked the instant Shivani Schulz's entire life just changed. Around 20 years ago, Shivani was a little girl navigating the chaos of a busy New Delhi railway station, clinging tightly to her mother while keeping an eye on her younger brother. Within moments, her mother vanished into the crowd and never came back. Today, the young woman is a wife and a mother whose adoption story has moved millions of people across the internet. But beneath all that is a childhood built on trauma and years spent not knowing what comes next.

“I don't remember what my birth mother looks like”

When people look at Shivani's life today, it can be difficult to picture the pain that quietly shaped who she became. “My earliest memories were not happy ones,” she says. She describes growing up in a household full of fear. She had an abusive father and a mother who was terrified but doing everything she could to protect her children. In a separate video posted on Instagram, Shivani opened up about how her memory of her birth mother has faded with time. “I don't remember what she looks like. I don't remember her name. We were so young that all I remember is how I felt around her, which was her fear.” “The only memories I have are of my birth dad physically beating her, yelling at her, and then her letting go of my hand,” she says.

The day childhood ended for her…

When Shivani and her little brother lost their mother at the railway station, everything changed in an instant. What followed next was something no child is ever supposed to face alone. While other children her age were worrying about playgrounds and homework, Shivani suddenly found herself carrying a far heavier weight. “I became my little brother's protector. His survival became more important than my own fear.”
Eventually, a policeman found the siblings and took them to an orphanage.

Three years of fear, loneliness and unanswered questions

For the next three years, that orphanage was the only place she could call ‘home.’ Looking back, Shivani describes those years as among the darkest of her life.
“They were some of the darkest years of my life filled with trauma, fear, and loneliness,” she says. Like so many children growing up in orphanages, she had questions that had no easy answers. “I had so many questions: Would our mother ever find us? Would anyone ever love us? Would we ever have a family again?” However, she says despite all the trauma, she had someone. “Even there... I felt like someone was with me. God was making himself known to me long before I even knew his name.”

After multiple failed adoptions, everything changed

Finding a family was not a smooth road. Shivani has spoken about going through several failed adoption attempts. Then an American family came to the orphanage. “I remember standing at the top of the staircase in the orphanage, terrified to believe this could be real.” And then she looked down and saw the woman who would become her mother. “I saw my new mom waiting with her arms wide open.” “For the first time in years, I felt safe. I felt chosen,” she says.

What happened to her brother?

The family who came for Shivani made a choice that would quietly shape the rest of both children's lives. “They chose not just me but my little brother too. They wanted us to stay together.” And then the story takes a turn that seems almost too extraordinary to be coincidence. Years down the line, her brother ended up marrying her husband's younger sister. When Shivani shared this with her followers, she wrote: “My brother and I were both adopted by the same wonderful family. And it gets even better. He ended up marrying my husband's little sister, so now we are family forever.”

What draws people to her story is that it goes so much deeper than the adoption itself. It is the story of a small, frightened girl who stepped into the role of protector at an age when she herself deserved protection. These days, Shivani uses her platform to speak honestly about adoption, family, identity, faith, and the long process of healing. As Shivani says today: "I'm a wife. A mother. And I have a happy, beautiful family of my own." After all she has been through, those might just be the most powerful words of all.